Keep your god off my couch

I was fortunate enough to pass through the early years of my childhood relatively unscathed by formal religious indoctrination. God probably came up once or twice, but as my parents were each members of different faiths, no particular importance seemed to be attached to him. Oh sure, we used to recite the Lord’s prayer in school, but that was just one more thing to get through before we could get out of there and get down to some serious fun. God, like Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy were relegated to the ash heap of childhood fantasy once I began to realize that the real world bore scant resemblance to the realms of childhood mythology.

Despite this dearth of formal indoctrination, it was impossible to miss the dominant worldview that God created our world and everything in it for some inscrutable purpose. I still have vague memories of occasional “end…